With completion of the joint school facility creeping ever closer, the municipality is turning its sights to the high school exchange lands.
As things stand, the municipality and Grande Yellowhead Public School Division have an agreement that the old high school on Pyramid Lake Road will be demolished on or before Dec. 15 and the land it sits on will be remediated—graded, grassed, irrigated, and possibly fenced—to meet the appropriate environmental standards.
That agreement is the result of a land exchange, which saw the municipality swap the former dog park on Bonhomme Street—which is now the site of the new school facility—for a portion of the current high school lands.
The school division has nearly $750,000 earmarked for its remediation efforts, with any unexpended funds going to the municipality for further work on the land—like purchasing and planting trees.
Over the past few years, many ideas have been floated in the community as to what the land should become, including another regulation-sized soccer pitch or a centrally-located dog park.
But, beyond remediation, there is no real plan for what that land will become.
So, Christine Nadon, manager of communications for the municipality, brought forward a request for direction at the May 13 committee-of-the-whole meeting, to find out how council would like to proceed with its future communications and possible public consultations.
In response, Coun. Gilbert Wall noted that it won’t be long before the exchange lands are in the municipality’s possession, and suggested it would be wise to get a timeline in place for public consultation.
“We could conceivably have the land back in our possession by spring of next year, so that doesn’t leave an awful lot of time,” he said.
“The building is going to come down in October, probably, or start to come down and then by spring they’re going to start reclaiming this piece of land, so we’ll have to be able to direct [the workers].”
And to direct them, the municipality will have to know what it wants with the land, he said.
Alice Lettner, director of finance, agreed, noting that if grass and irrigation are put in place before the municipality decides what the land is going to be used for, that work might have to be done a second time.
“Depending on what you decide to do in the long-term with that land it might be inappropriate to have the irrigation in, because if you’re going to do a soccer field, you have to be very careful where you put those sprinkler heads.
“My feeling is—it’s only my perception—but maybe we do want some public input so we have an idea of where the majority of the public is [leaning] because that’s going to influence at least some things, even just the grading and whether or not we put the irrigation in.”
Another reason to delay a project like irrigation, as well as public consultation on the exchange lands, noted Peter Waterworth, chief administrative officer, is that the municipality is entering into a large-scale review of land use planning and development with Parks Canada.
“This is a much more complex issue than simply deciding, let’s put a football pitch on that land or let’s put the trees on that land,” he said.
“If we’re going to be getting into a two-year community consultation about where things are in the community, there could be further exchanges and moving stuff around; it’s for that reason that the recommendation is making no decision on [the land’s] permanent use at this stage.”
No decisions were made at the committee-of-the-whole meeting, but administration was asked to provide council with more information, so that each councillor is on the same page moving forward.
Nicole Veerman
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